But the truth is: We all just found this farm mesmerizing. It's lit by LED lights and instead of sand the ants are working to build a colony using a blue gel full of amino acids, sugars and fungicides to keep the ants alive.

That gel was developed by a group of Syracuse students and researchers at the University of Colorado working on a NASA experiment. It allowed the ants to dig and survive in a zero-gravity environment. National Geographic explains that after 19 delays, the experiment finally launched on-board the doomed Shuttle Columbia.